Umurangi Generation News

Hi Everyone,

Today we have put out a long overdue patch. Some bug fixes here, some new additions there.

You may have noticed our launch on Xbox recently, with that we went through a whole new round of QA which found a ton of very obscure bugs which were patched. With this, Unity was also updated to a new version (from 2019 to 2021). This caused an issue for the PC build which was released last week on Gamepass, which todays patch (simultaneous to the one released on gamepass) has addressed. These were in relation to the refresh rate fixes, mouse scroll wheel input and some other little things. While I try to fix everything that gets reported some issues I can't replicate due to the unique nature of how PC work. But I am always trying my best to make sure everyone can play. If you have any issues which have popped up since this patch or have incompatibility please let me know so I can fix it for you.

The main addition to this patch is 3 new languages added
- French
- Korean
- Italian

For PC, my next focus will be making the custom levels compatible with Steam Workshop as well as making it so you can edit a text file to configure the game to your machines specific stuff.

Umurangi Generation has come a long way since its initial release. Its held together with duct tape and love.

Ves

HI,

We've updated the game to fix the following 2 minor bugs. We've been working on a port of the game and found the root cause of some issues on PC.


It seems a certain glitch occurred where the red tracers on Contact were calling a physics calculation while colliding into a solid object. With the new 144hz update, this would calculate more than twice per frame and the bottleneck was found. We wrote some custom code that prevents this physics calculation from occurring because it is not necessary. It seems this was a default setting based on a template we used to achieve the effect.

You should find that this level is much more performant


We got clues something was wrong when a player asked 'is the DLC free now?' they were using a public beta 'development build' of the game. For development the game temporarily unlocks everything including the DLC. Something which seems to have slipped through in the last patch is that all the levels were unlocked on a non development build as well as the option to choose which mode players would like to use. If players loaded into a creative mode or speedrun mode with no save file the game would save this mode as the default. Once the player would exit, they would be unable to access the mode selection, but the default would be locked to creative mode.

We've prevented players from being to do this bug when playing, but it is still technically possible if they delete the playerProgress.fdsave file but not the input_settings.fdsave file located next to the gallery directory. We will have a cleaner fix to this next week.


During the Protest Level the feet of the protestors use an Inverse Kinematic Setting to firmly plant them on the ground. It seems with the change to 144hz code this has resulted in 2 bugs
1) it offsets the starting position causing some of them to clip into each other
2) it causes unnecessary physics calculations per frame.
For this fix, we replaced this setting with a custom script which on the first frame of the game, the character scans the ground below them and sets the position to this. This does not require a physics calculation and therefore gives a huge performance boost.

Thank you for your patience and reporting the issues. We appreciate everyone's great feedback.

Hi Everyone! Hope you've all been snapping and sharing your shots. This update we wanted to give pc players some much requested features. Hope you enjoy. We will continue to add your feedback in the future.

[h2]Language Packs (Spanish, Te Reo Māori, Traditional Chinese)[/h2]
We’ve added new language packs for the game and will continue to add more in the future. One of the big ones we’ve added is Te Reo Māori support. This is something that has a lot of intangible value, seeing a language which was close to extinction less than 50 years ago, come back with strength and be translated by young Māori people into a video game. We would like to thank our mates at Ngati Gaming for the translation. Much love and mana you huas 😛


[h2]21:9 Ultrawide Screen Support[/h2]
We’ve added support for 21:9 Ultrawide Support. This was tricky as we had to rework some stuff with the UI as it wasn’t designed to scale with this aspect ratio.
Note: after selecting the 21:9 Ultra Wide option please restart the game. Trust me it is easier to do this.

[h2]144hz Support[/h2]
We’ve added 144hz support for high refresh rate monitors. This should automatically detect this refresh rate and adjust accordingly. Having a high refresh rate will however cause your computer to calculate a larger amount of draw calls so this may hinder performance.

[h2]Performance Improvements[/h2]
We’ve been working on console ports and a lot of these features have resulted in smaller FPS saves here and there. Obviously these improvements carry over.


[h2]Interpolated Movement[/h2]
Interpolated Movement is a system of movement which makes the control of the game much smoother. This required re-doing a lot of movement scripts and a lot of fundamental things with the game. Many people had stated that the current movement had made them feel sick. We hope this improvement will help players with motion sickness and overall make the game much smoother to play. Sorry speedrunners this may stop you from being able to clip through walls because it checks where your last position was. Check out this article by Scott Sewell for more information. Absolute Legend
https://www.kinematicsoup.com/news/2016/8/9/rrypp5tkubynjwxhxjzd42s3o034o8


[h2]Custom Level Support Beta[/h2]
We’ve worked to add custom level support to the game. We’ve put a sticky on the Discord which should help with players creating levels. Please note you will need to opt into the beta branch to use this feature. All levels are just side loaded through the documents folder.
Head to our discord here: https://discord.gg/FPVv964

[h2]Steam Cloud Saving[/h2]
We’ve added Steam Cloud Saving to Umurangi Generation. This is an automatic setting which will backup your *.FDSAVE files in your LocalLow folder (1 up from your Gallery Folder).

[h2]Bug Fixes[/h2]
Like every patch we found some bugs here and there. A few notable ones are to do with the speedrun mode which wouldn’t reset stats between levels. We hope this helps speedrunners compete and create their own fun.

The Independent Games Festival awards and the Game Developers Conference awards were held last night in cyberspace. Like a Zoom meeting for the soul, the ceremony hopped between the winning game developers’ living rooms, with host Victoria Tran (community director on Among Us) stitching it all together with a remarkable combination of enthusiasm, sincerity, and silliness. She gets an IGF from me.

The big winner was Umurangi Generation by Origame Digital. The photography sci-fi game won the 'Seumas McNally Grand Prize' and the narrative prize at the IGF awards. Hades was also recognised as the game of the year at the GDC awards. The rest of the winners, and the whole darn ceremony, are below.

Read more

Hi Everyone Ves here,

Umurangi Generation has been updated. I would like to be transparent with the game over the last few days having a few updates pushed to everyone's machines. It has been a while since I updated the public branch because I have been working on the Nintendo Switch Build and the new modes. These modes required translation so they were something I couldn’t make live immediately. In the meantime I worked on fixing as many bugs as possible and improving the game with things like slippery movement. Unfortunately that introduced some new bugs, which hopefully should mostly be squashed. However, there is still more work to do as the game grows over time. I have set up a beta branch (password: betabranch2021) which I will update more regularly with fixes to individual bugs which come through on the discussions thread and then put out an update to the public branch with these fixes every few weeks. This is because updates are always going to be 400-600MB and constantly pushing these updates is annoying and something I am sure everyone would rather not get spammed with.

[h2]Why are updates 400-600mb? [/h2]

This is largely due to compression. With Unity you have the option to compress assets as an uncompressed build of the game is 3.5GB, with the assets compressed the game is 600-800MB. The reason updates are 400-600MB is most of these assets are combined into one during the compilation process, so this ends up being much much smaller in the long run but something that is annoying to constantly get updates on. Thank you for understanding.

Because of this I highly recommend you only opt-in to the beta branch if the game is currently having an issue on your machine. One of the issues which slipped through was that players with high refresh rate screens (120hz, 144hz) would have extremely slow movement and jumping. This was due to the new creative mode changing how movement works due to the ability to now slow down time. This issue is fixed now but it is something I was unable to test with my current machine. Another issue is that the game became very pixelated. Something that should be fixed now.

[h2]A few notable notes[/h2]
-AMD Processors Fix. Players with certain AMD Processors were having issues running the game.
-Less Slippery Movement. Movement is much more rigid than before. With the player sometimes slipping down stairs or off objects.
-Creative Mode Added. Express your creativity by going back to old levels and changing the time of day, fog, sun colour and more.
-Speedrun Mode Added. Run through the whole game. Note: for users who do not have the Macro DLC this will just be the base game only.
-Speedrun Mode (Single) Added. Run through a single level as fast as you can.
-Speedrun Mode (Macro Only Added). Run through the Macro DLC levels only as fast as you can. (Requires Macro DLC)
-Speedrun Mode (No Macro Added). Run through the base game levels (requires Macro DLC)
-Performance fixes. Certain levels should run better now. We made certain objects less intense by turning off settings which are not even visible. One of the benefits porting to less powerful hardware is seeing where bottle necks are and everyone getting those improvements retroactively.
-Bug fixes. We fixed a load of bugs with certain things. For example screen flicker when saving the game.
-Unity Updated from 2019.4.3 to 2020.

[h2]Whats to come in the future?[/h2]

For the PC community I want you all to know I have not forgotten about you. There are some really cool things which I plan on adding here, things like a customisable config file and eventually some custom level support which will be exclusive. You will be able to build your own custom levels which can be side loaded into your documents folder.

Thank you once again for all your support. Things are sometimes going to be rocky and I appreciate everyone's patience.